Byron Kim, Developer in New York, NY, United States
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Byron Kim

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Developer

Location
New York, NY, United States
Toptal Member Since
October 2, 2019

With over 11 years of hands-on experience working in infrastructure from data centers to the cloud, Byron is an open-source enthusiast who loves to learn new things every day. He's also an AWS certified solutions architect and always strives to put all of his infrastructure projects through source control.

Portfolio

Voyent, Inc.
Security, Infrastructure as Code (IaC)...
Institute for Integrative Nutrition
Security, Amazon Route 53, Automation, Jenkins, Amazon Web Services (AWS)...
TMP Worldwide
Limelight, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows, Infrastructure

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Amazon Web Services (AWS), GitHub, Ubuntu, Linux

The most amazing...

...project was helping a client achieve ISO 27001 certification. There were many epics completed in a tight deadline that helped the client acquire new accounts.

Work Experience

DevOps Engineer

2015 - PRESENT
Voyent, Inc.
  • Migrated Jenkins into source control and made it fully immutable using various plugins and Groovy scripts to configure Jenkins and all of its jobs.
  • Deployed and configured immutable instances and applications using Packer and Ansible; specifically sent AMI instances to multiple regions for disaster recovery.
  • Secured the AWS environment and standards and helping the client achieve ISO 27001 certification.
  • Leveraged an AWS EC2 container service and application load balancer to introduce microservice architecture.
  • Secured the environment and deployments using HashiCorp Vault.
  • Wrote a Bash Script to run client applications on local Kubernetes cluster using Minikube on Ubuntu-based OS.
  • Deployed Atlantis to manage Terraform changes through pull requests to increase visibility among the team.
  • Migrated all Terraform configurations to 0.12.x and re-organized the entire Terraform repository to ease future maintenance.
  • Wrote Python script to rotate all user's access and secret keys to ensure compliance. The script ran in AWS leveraging Lambda, Cloudwatch Events, and Google Spreadsheets.
Technologies: Security, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), AWS Key Management Service (KMS), Amazon Route 53, Automation, Git, Flask, Python, AWS Lambda, Continuous Deployment, Serverless, Amazon Web Services (AWS), DevOps, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Bash, AWS IAM, Kubernetes, Packer, Consul, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), Ansible, Vault, Jenkins, Docker, Terraform, DevSecOps, ISO 27001, Containers, Containerization, DevOps Engineer, Governance, IT Governance, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), CI/CD Pipelines, Web Application Firewall (WAF), SecOps, AWS Systems Manager, Cloud Security, Data Lakes, Cloud, Infrastructure, AWS CloudTrail, FedRAMP, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, Bitbucket, AWS CodePipeline, React

Director of IT Infrastructure

2012 - 2015
Institute for Integrative Nutrition
  • Managed the cloud (AWS, Rackspace), a service provider (Datapipe), and internal infrastructure.
  • Configured the back-end infrastructure with Ansible and EC2 instances running Node.js, MongoDB, and Nginx.
  • Migrated all of the critical systems to a redundant architecture to provide stability and increased uptime.
  • Supervised multiple AWS accounts using various services like EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront, and Route 53.
  • Oversaw all technological purchases of IT services and equipment operating within a $2 million budget and outlined policies for all of the equipment.
Technologies: Security, Amazon Route 53, Automation, Jenkins, Amazon Web Services (AWS), DevOps, Docker, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Bash, AWS IAM, Windows, Linux, Data Pipelines, Terraform, Ansible, Rackspace, DevSecOps, DevOps Engineer, Cloud, Infrastructure, AWS CloudTrail

Senior Systems Engineer

2011 - 2012
TMP Worldwide
  • Configured Windows clustering for Microsoft SQL servers.
  • Created load balancing virtual IPs (VIPs) for front-end web servers using Cisco CSS.
  • Consolidated 50% of the infrastructure from physical hardware to virtual machines.
  • Implemented CDNs (CacheFly, Limelight) to offset server load and reduce bottleneck issues.
  • Managed over 200 servers and instances running on Windows Server and Ubuntu.
Technologies: Limelight, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows, Infrastructure

Systems Engineer

2008 - 2011
Worldnow (now Frankly, Inc.)
  • Managed over 200 servers in a co-located data center running various flavors of Windows.
  • Consolidated physical servers to virtual machines using VMware ESXi.
  • Wrote scripts to self-heal application web servers to limit overnight alert pages.
  • Configured Limelight and Akamai to help deliver site content and to help deliver traffic spikes.
Technologies: Security, Automation, Cisco, Windows, Infrastructure

ISO 27001 Certification

I helped a client achieve ISO 27001 Certification on a tight deadline. This project involved many parts such as writing a Lambda function to rotate all user's AWS access keys, configuring Vault for secrets management, segment AWS VPC's for application environments, encrypting and enforcing data encryption on S3 buckets with sensitive data, and more. Achieving the certification helped the client gain new accounts and increase their revenue.

Immutable Jenkins

Jenkins is still a widely used CI/CD but often requires a lot of maintenance. With the use of Docker, I set up Jenkins to be fully immutable. The plugins are installed at build time, and with the use of Groovy, I can pre-seed all the jobs beforehand. The build logs are then exported to a central platform. AWS CodeDeploy was leveraged to automate the deployment of the Jenkins updates.

Migrate Batch Process Server to Immutable Infrastructure

A client had a single large EC2 instance configured with many applications and cron jobs to handle their data ingestion and pipelines. While the server had some backups, it was a single point of failure for all jobs so my first task was to convert all the Python applications to Docker and run it in AWS ECS. At the time, I used Cloudwatch Events and wrote a Lambda function to schedule and run the jobs. The ECS infrastructure could scale as needed so the EC2 cost went down since there was no longer a need to run a larger instance type. There was no longer a single point of failure for the batch processes and the infrastructure was more scalable and redundant.

Languages

Bash, Python, JavaScript, SQL, Groovy, SAML, Go

Tools

Terraform, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), AWS IAM, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), Jenkins, Docker Compose, Vault, Ansible, Shell, GitHub, Git, VPN, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Systems Manager, AWS CloudTrail, Bitbucket, ELK (Elastic Stack), Packer, Zsh, Oh My Zsh, NPM, Tmux, GitLab, Auth0, Amazon CloudFront CDN, AWS CodeDeploy

Paradigms

DevOps, DevSecOps, HIPAA Compliance, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), Automation, Continuous Deployment, MEAN Stack

Platforms

Amazon EC2, Ubuntu, Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, AWS Lambda, Amazon Linux, Rackspace, Windows, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Kubernetes, LAMP, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Storage

Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Redshift, Microsoft SQL Server, Elasticsearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Active Directory, Data Pipelines, Data Lakes

Other

AWS DevOps, Linux Server Administration, Architecture, Solution Architecture, Identity & Access Management (IAM), IT Security, ISO 27001, Compliance, Amazon Route 53, IT Governance, Governance, DevOps Engineer, Cloud Security, SecOps, Infrastructure, Cloud, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Security, Serverless, SFTP, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Shell Scripting, Containers, Containerization, CI/CD Pipelines, FedRAMP, Limelight, Cisco, Computer Engineering, Consul, API Gateways, OAuth, LDAP, Web Application Firewall (WAF), Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, AWS CodePipeline

Frameworks

Serverless Framework, Flask, Django

Libraries/APIs

Node.js, Terragrunt, Jenkins Pipeline, React

2001 - 2005

Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Engineering

Fairfield University - Fairfield, CT, USA

SEPTEMBER 2017 - SEPTEMBER 2020

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate

AWS

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